Friday, September 02, 2011

Happy Labor Day weekend. So before you leave, here's a situation to consider. I'm curious to know how you would react, before i tell you what really happened.

Tuesday night, I went to the Padres @ Dodgers game and sat behind home plate on the field level. Early in the game, a foul ball clears the protective fence (pretty quickly) and arcs right back into the face of a poor kid, probably three or four years of age. The ball ricochets off the kids face and across the aisle to a guy just standing there.

Kid is wailing. His father immediately picks up the poor kid and cradles him in his arms as the red mark starts to appear.

Guy across the aisle with the ball is kind of flabbergasted. He didn't do anything to deflect the ball into the kid's face--he was across the aisle for pete's sake--and just sort of ended up with the foul ball after the errant bounce. The guy looks genuinely surprised to be in this situation in the first place.

Crowd is looking staring at the kid, and also staring at the adult.

Question 1: If you are the adult who has the ball, what would you do?

Question 2: If you are in the vicinity of the incident but not related to either party, what would you do?

I wasn't the one who caught the ball but I did end up involving myself in the situation. I'm eager to hear how you would have responded, however. Don't think about this too long; in the heat of the moment, what would you do?

1) Remove shirt, pound chest and yell so that everyone around is aware of my awesomeness. I just caught a foul ball that ricocheted off someone else's FACE fer fuck's sake!

2) Run over, smack the kid upside the head (the side that didn't get hit with the ball...I'm no child abuser, duh), and say, "look, kid, you don't catch it with your friggin' teeth. Here's how you do it." Then proceed to show him the proper way of catching a line-drive. It's the whole, 'give a man a fish or teach him how to fish argument'.

Better question is what did Sax do? I bet he took the ball from the guy who "caught" it saying he was going to give it to the kid. Then he ran up the aisle and disappeared into the night screaming "I finally caught a foul ball! Scratch that off the bucket list!!!".